On sports

Many people have often mistaken me for some sort of an elitist or snob when it comes to sports. I always find this a rather funny claim as such, since in the modern world where aristocracy is rare and the former class hierarchies of e.g. the British have been disappearing, it's questionable whether one can even raise one sport above another on this dimension.

Take, for instance, golf. Golf is a good walk spoiled, as pointed out by Mr. Twain. It is deemed as an elitist sport by some people, yet they are wrong. They assume that golf is only played by affluent people, or at least this is how I perceive their strongest argument. Yet they fail to see that in modern times, golf is not a very expensive sport. A friend of mine in grade school used to play ice hockey and drove motocross. Both are miles more expensive than golf. Granted, if one wishes to join the older and more exclusive clubs, membership will cost more. But again, this holds true for all aspects of life, and golf as such is in no way an exceptional sport. It is comparable to a nice walk in the park during the weekend, and not that many people think of taking a walk as anything fancy--golf is no different.

Fencing is another interesting example. It is again understood by some to be an exclusive or snobbish sport, yet fencing has always been one of the most widely spread forms of doing combat, regardless of social class. The history is long and as a sport, fencing has only recently evolved into what it is these days. The fundamentals are simple: score points by hitting your opponent while keeping on the piste. Different weapons have different rule sets and there is a certain dress code in place for safety reasons; one must remember that one of the most important things about any sport is to ensure that decent safety measures are in place so that nobody gets hurt. The only possible rationale behind the assumption that fencing is an elitist sport is that it used to be the de facto method of nobility to rid the world of each other, namely in duels, during the 18th and 19th centuries. And even then, many other people practiced fencing, regardless of social class.

Some people have thrown snide remarks about how I must only prefer polo. I must admit that my connections to polo are nonexistent; I've been to see polo once or twice, but that's about it. I'm not capable of riding a horse and even if I were, my left-handedness would mean that I would not be able to play it. Now, with polo I'll admit that it is slightly more exclusive, but that is primarily because it is similar to sailing in the sense that it requires larger financial investments; in sailing you must have a boat and in polo you must have a horse. But if you look at the history of polo, it in fact has served the purpose of being a training routine for horsemen, used for teaching discipline and precise handling of a horse. When it turned into a more widely acknowledged sport, owning the horse was again the possible deal breaker, but to my understanding the exclusivity of the sport is very much questionable.

I could go on, but I don't think there would be a point. For some reason I have a feeling that the hostility is based more on people not being familiar with different sports. Everyone has played football, baseball, hockey, etc. in school and are more or less familiar with them. These are good games for schools, since they require little or no preparations and are very safe for kids. Giving swords adolescents and watching them poke each others' eyes out would cause a lot more liability issues. But because people are not familiar with these sorts of "rarer" (yes, I know, in reality none of the above sports, with the exception of polo, is that rare), people are afraid of them. A similar situation can be seen in the typical Finnish attitude toward foreign people. To my annoyance, during my primary school period, my class was full of ignorant and scared people who were afraid of everything that was slightly upsetting their perception of the status quo.

Another related thing is that even though everyone attempts to be a unique individual, people in fact cluster very much and are hostile to people from outside their clusters. As everyone who's ever been to junior high will know, getting bullied doesn't require much; just that you in some way stand out from the crowd. Now, an interesting thing to think about is this: take for instance golf and football. Both are very popular sports, but football is arguably the larger one. Golf has a certain stigma attached to it. So analogically the football crowd is the gray mass in junior high, and golf is that smaller group that stays out of the former group and just goes in its own way. Now think about the behavior of footballists and golfers. Just a thought experiment one could take a bit further...